According to the Platonic idea of the Kosmos, as given in the "Timæus," there existed, anterior to all time, primordial matter in a state of chaos. This matter was not created for; according to Mr. Grote, whose authority upon such a point is the highest, the notion of absolute creation was unknown to the Greeks of antiquity, and it does not appear that Plato suggests it. But, without accounting for its existence, Plato assumes that there was matter in a condition of utter chaos before time could have had an existence; and, in order to make the chaotic condition the more impressive in its primitive destitution of all form or active principles tending to union or arrangement, he supposes that the four elements of fire, air, earth, and water had no existence save in the abstract, or as ideas and forms. But, as abstract ideas, these four elements of fire, air, earth, and water were distinct, self-existing, and indestructible, coeval with the chaotic matter which was waiting to receive their impress and to take on their distinctive elemental characters. They had already begun to act on the _fundamentum_, or primordial chaotic matter, as upon a recipient, but it was in a confused way and without regularity of plan, so that they had not become concrete existences or determinate agents. In this state of things there appears upon the scene the Demiurgus, a being coeval with the chaos of matter, that is, self-existing and eternal. But, consistently with the philosophy which did not admit of the idea of absolute creation, the Demiurgus was not a creator, but an architect or designer, working on materials that lay within his reach. His moral attribute was goodness, which was, in his situation, synonymous with order, regularity, symmetry, and proportion, and, along with this tendency, he had supreme artistic skill. In other words, he was the personification of νους, or reason, working against necessity: the latter being, not what we mean by that term, something preordained and fixed, but confusion, uncertainty, irregularity, and unreason, which are to be overcome by their opposites.